Chapter IV: Part 4

Morton looked at him suspiciously.

"Why check on it? Should it change?"

"Perhaps," said Terry. "We've speared most of the deep-sea fish in the lagoon. Maybe we've interfered with ... the reports from the plastic objects, telling what was happening up here. There may be a reaction. If so, most likely the humming will stop, and after a longer or shorter time begin again. And then, if my guess is right, there'll be more deep-sea creatures in the lagoon."

"Ha," said Morton. "I think you and I have the same kind of delusions! All right. I'll see that that's done. You two do the rest."

He went abovedecks. When Terry got on deck, Dr. Morton's angular figure was already marching along the wharf to the shore.

There was no ceremony of departure. The _Esperance_ cast off and her engine started. She moved toward the lagoon entrance under power only, but her sails were hoisted as she floated on, and Jug Bell was trimming the jib when she cleared the opening to the sea.

The humming in the water was still audible to the submarine ear, close to the land. It occurred to Terry to take a bearing on the source of the sound, noting both the compass direction and the vertical angle from the reef. If his vertical-angle reading was accurate, a line from the reef to the source of the sound would touch the bottom at twenty-seven thousand feet down, between four and five miles away.

The _Esperance_ sailed on. The humming duly faded away. Terry left the recorder picking up undersea sounds, without recording them. It relayed the underwater sounds to the people on deck. It was in Terry's mind to keep at least half an ear cocked to it, in case the mooing sounds, heard and recorded elsewhere, should come again.

They did not. The _Esperance_ went methodically on her way, headed south by east, under sail. A slowly swaying horizon of unbroken sea was all about. There was nothing in the least unusual or mysterious to be seen anywhere.

Presently, Terry found himself in conversation with Deirdre, and the world seemed so blatantly normal that their talk dodged all unusual trends. They talked about their childhoods, about things they had done and places they had seen.

At about four in the afternoon Nick bellowed, "_Thar she blows!_" in a fine attempt at proper whaling ship style, and all the _Esperance's_ company joined to watch a spouting far ahead. The yacht changed course a little, and presently reached a pod of sperm whales at the surface. The huge dark bodies moved leisurely through the water. Jud displayed great erudition on the subject and explained in detail how their spouting proved them to be sperm whales. Deirdre pointed out a baby whale close beside a larger one.

They sailed on, leaving the whales behind. The crew-cuts, inevitably, argued about them. They canvassed all the information and misinformation they possessed and came up with a heated discussion about whales, how they can swim down to the enormous depths without suffering from the bends on rising again. Then the conversation turned to the food they eat. Whalers, in the old days, had found snouts of squids and undigested sections of squids' tentacles in the stomachs of harpooned sperm whales. There were reports of sections of tentacles four feet thick, implying a startling total size, all of which proved that the whales had been at the bottom of the ocean, where such gigantic squids can be found. These were the reports of reliable whaling skippers. Certainly the scars made by the tentacular arms of huge squids, indicating battle, have been found on the skin of sperm whales, and there have been reports of battles on the surface between whales and squids of sizes most naturalists would be unwilling to certify. In such cases it was assumed that the squids had been attacked at the bottom of the sea and had followed the whale to the surface when it came up in need of air. Certainly only an enormous squid would be able to sustain a battle with a whale.

Terry listened to the discussion. Everybody had his own opinion.

"You'd never settle the argument, unless you could put a camera and a flash gun on a whale and get an instrument-report from it."

Which was not a new idea, of course. But it was curious that the thought of sending self-reporting instruments down to the bottom of the sea had been suggested by his own suspicion that similar instruments had been sent up from below. Sounding lines had been lowered with thermometers and nets and sampling machines. Core-takers had been dropped to get samplings of abyssal mud. But tethered instrumentation is never more than so useful.

Deirdre said something. Terry realized that she'd repeated it. He'd become absorbed in the possibilities of instrument-reporting from the surface to the depths and back again.

"You're not listening," protested Deirdre. "I'm talking about the bathyscaphe that ought to be in Manila any day now."

"I'm trying to picture myself going down in a bathyscaphe," said Terry hastily. "I don't think I'd like it."

A bathyscaphe is a metal sphere with walls and windows of enormous thickness, hung from a metal balloon filled with gasoline for flotation. It is lowered to appalling depths with the help of heavy ballast, and is equipped with electric motors for independent motion. It carries powerful electric reflectors which allow as much as thirty or forty feet of visibility. It rises to the surface again when its ballast is dumped. There are only three such undersea exploring devices in the whole world.

"I'm not at all sure you wouldn't like it," said Deirdre.

Terry scowled at his own thoughts. There are opinions a man holds firmly without ever being aware of them, unless they are challenged, and if that happens, he is deeply suspicious of the challenge because it suggests that his opinion needs to be re-examined. Terry had been gathering scraps of information here, and unquestionable items there, resisting a conclusion all the while.

It seemed fantastic to think that the plastic objects carried by deep-sea fish out of their natural environment were actually man-made instruments--telemetering apparatus closely comparable to the devices used to transmit information from outer space. It was wildly imaginative to suppose that they transmitted information from the water surface to the depths of the ocean; that fish had been driven up from the abyss in order to report what went on at the surface. Report to whom? It was the most fantastic of fantasies to think that there was curiosity, in the Luzon Deep, about the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the surface waters and of those areas not covered by the sea.

But Terry stopped short. There were limits to the ideas he would allow his brain to think about.

Deirdre walked away, and he assured himself he never thought of anything so ridiculous as the conclusions he had just reached. Presently, dinner was served, and Terry painstakingly acted like a perfectly rational person. After dinner Davis, as usual, settled himself down to enjoy a program of symphonic music from San Francisco, many thousands of miles away. And Deirdre vanished from sight again.

Later on Terry found himself alone on the _Esperance's_ deck, except for Nick at the wheel--a mere dark figure seen only by the light of the binnacle lamp. There was a diffused, faint glow coming from the after-cabin hatch. Up forward, one of the crew-cuts plucked a guitar, and Terry could imagine Doug dourly trying to read poetry despite the noise. The sails were black against the sky. The deck was darker than the sea.

Terry's guesses haunted him. He assured himself that he did not entertain them even for an instant. They were absurd! A part of his mind argued speciously that if they were absurd there was no reason not to test them. If he was afraid to try, it would imply that at least part of him believed them.

He picked up one of the plastic objects, and moved the recorder close to the lee rail. It still transmitted faithfully, at minimum volume, the washing of the waves as heard from beneath, and occasional small sounds from living creatures, generally far away in the sea. Heeled over as the _Esperance_ was, his hand could reach down into the rushing waters overside.

He came to a resolution. He felt foolish, but by now he was determined to try an experiment. Tiny light-blue sparks flashed where the water raced past the yacht's planking. When he dipped his hand, water piled up against his wrist and a streak of brightness trailed away behind.

He tapped the plastic object against the hull. One tap, two taps, three taps, four taps. Then five, six, seven, eight. He went back to one. One tap, two, and three and four. Five and six and seven and eight.

The recorder gave out the tappings the underwater microphone had picked up. It seemed to Terry that the loudspeaker struggled to emit the shrillest imaginable sounds in strict synchrony with the tappings.

Then Deirdre's voice came quietly, very near.

"I don't think," she said evenly, "that that's a fair thing to do."

He'd been bent over the rail in an awkward position. He straightened up, guiltily.

"I know it's nonsense, but I was ... ashamed to admit ..."

"To admit," Deirdre concluded for him, "that by tapping numbers with a plastic spy-device, you hoped to say to whom it might concern that we've found a communicator, and we know what it is, and we're trying to get in touch with the intelligent creatures who made it."

To hear his own self-denied guesses spoken aloud was appalling. Terry instantly disbelieved them entirely.

"It's ridiculous, of course," he protested. "It's childish...."

"But it could be true," said Deirdre. "And, if true, it could be dangerous. Suppose whatever put those plastic gadgets on the fish doesn't want to be communicated with? Suppose it feels that it should defend the secret of its existence by killing those who suspect it? I wasn't spying on you," she added. "I heard the tappings down below."

Then she was gone. He saw the interruption in the light from the after-cabin hatch as she went below.

He was suddenly filled with horror at the idea that if his guesses did prove to be right, he might have endangered Deirdre. And then he ceased to feel foolish. He felt like a criminal instead.

For a long, long time he listened with desperate intensity to the recorder, lest he hear some reply to his signals.

But no answer came. The sounds from undersea remained utterly commonplace.

When morning arrived he was in a state of desperate gloom. At breakfast Deirdre acted as if she considered the incident closed. And, such being the nature of men, Terry felt worse than before.

He was not wholly at ease again, even when that afternoon the _Esperance_ sailed in past Cavite and Corregidor and into Manila Bay. A new ship was at anchor in the harbor. It was a stubby, stocky ship which Davis regarded with interest.

"That's the _Pelorus_," he told Terry as the yacht passed within a mile, on the way to her former anchorage. "She's the hydrographic ship with the bathyscaphe on board. We'll visit her. I'll get Nick to call her on short-wave."

He went forward, where Nick was making ready to drop the anchor. Davis took over the chore, and Nick went below.

"Are you going ashore?" asked Deirdre.

Terry shrugged. "I've no reason to."

She looked relieved. "Then you'll stay with the _Esperance_ until--things are settled one way or another? I mean, you're really enlisted?"

"Until there are no more ways left for me to blunder," said Terry distastefully. "I'm about through the list, though."

"Not at all!" protested Deirdre. "Tapping numbers was really a very good idea. I was horrible! I scolded because you'd kept it a secret from me. I'd have been proud if I'd thought of it first!"

Nick came back and spoke to Davis. Davis came aft.

"The _Pelorus_ will send a boat as soon as we've anchored," he told them. "They've heard something and want to see the plastic objects."

"I'd like the long end of a bet that they don't believe in them, or us," Terry said abruptly. "They're established authorities on the ocean bottom. They know a lot. They probably know so much they can't really believe there's anything more to know than what they're busy finding out now."

Davis shook his head. He was confident. The _Esperance_ anchored, almost exactly where she'd been when Terry first came on board. Within half an hour a boat arrived from the _Pelorus_. Terry repeated his refusal to go along. Deirdre went along with her father.

They came back a little over an hour later. At first Davis was almost speechless with fury. Then he told Terry, choking on his rage, "According to them, the plastic objects are a hoax. The hum is a school of fish. We aren't trained observers. At Thrawn Island they're astronomers and they simply don't know anything about biology. And we should realize that it's starkly impossible for intelligence to develop where the oxygen supply is limited. It's unthinkable that abyssal fish should have their swim bladders punctured so they won't explode from release of pressure when they come to the surface. Those in the lagoon aren't abyssal fish, just unfamiliar species!"

"Well?" Terry asked.

"Oh, they're going to make a bathyscaphe dive!" said Davis as angrily as before. "As a matter of courtesy to somebody--not us. They'll make it where we found fish packed in a circle. That happens to be the deepest part of the Luzon Deep, in any case. They don't object to our sending our dredge down first. They will be politely interested if it comes back up."

"I," announced Deirdre, "I am so mad I could spit!"

"There's no use in our staying here," said Davis, seething. "Our dredge should be ready. We'll go up to Barca and tow it to the point we want to send it down."

He ordered Nick to get ready to lift anchor.

"One question," Terry said finally. "Did you mention the bolides?"

"No!" snapped Davis. "Would I want them to think I was crazy?"

He stamped away.

The _Esperance_ put to sea again. She sailed north along the coast. At dinner everybody was quiet. It was the only meal, since Terry's joining, that had not been enlivened by an elaborate argument on some subject or other. Davis was still in an abominable mood. He knew it, and held himself to silence.

Later, Terry and Deirdre talked together. They refrained tacitly from speaking of marine biology or any reasons for tapping plastic objects against the _Esperance's_ hull. They discussed only trivia, but somehow Terry found any subject absorbing, when he was with Deirdre.

After a while she went below, and he stayed abovedecks, smoking. The moon had not yet risen when he turned in.

They sailed into the small harbor of Barca at ten in the morning. By twelve, local boatmen had towed out an ungainly object some thirty-two feet long. They tethered it to bitts at the _Esperance's_ stern. By one o'clock they had loaded on her deck a large, folded sack of sailcloth and half a dozen specially-cast concrete blocks with eyed iron rods cemented in them. At half-past one Deirdre, who had gone ashore in one of the yacht's own boats, came back with innumerable supplies she'd bought. At two o'clock the _Esperance_ went out to sea again.

The towed object was a construction around a central wooden spar with an iron tube at its top end and half a dozen lesser spars linked loosely to its bottom. A mass of fishnet was fastened to the smaller spars and heavy ropes were holding the spars and the net in place during its tow. There was a hook for attaching the main spar to the concrete sinkers.

"It opens like an umbrella," explained Deirdre. "We'll hoist it upright barely out of the water, and fasten on the weights. The canvas bag fits on that iron pipe. When you let it go, it sinks like an umbrella that's tightly closed, but when it touches bottom the weights spread it out and an explosive charge automatically goes off in that iron tube. It's special explosive. The gas it makes inflates the canvas bag, which can't burn underwater, and that floats the whole thing back up with the ribs of the umbrella stretched out and spreading the net between them. It should catch anything it encounters as it rises. As the pressure lowers, the excess gas can escape through a relief-valve. This dredge is experimental. If it works, it can be modified to do lots of things."

"Such as poking at things we don't believe in," said Terry drily. "That explosion ought to stir up anything in its neighborhood. It'll be much more disturbing and audible than a few light taps against the _Esperance's_ hull!"

Deirdre grinned ruefully and did not answer.

The bulky tow slowed the yacht. She did not reach the position of the fish-filled circle until after nightfall, and it was necessary to have plenty of light by which to locate the inflated bag when it came to the surface, so nothing could be tried until the following morning. A short while before daybreak, lights appeared at the horizon. Red and green sidelights, and white central lights. It was a steamer. It came closer and closer. Presently, it turned and headed upwind and went dead slow, barely keeping steerage. It was the _Pelorus_.

Dawn arrived in a golden radiance which thrust aside the night. The _Pelorus_ shone brightly in the first rays of the sun. A large object was hoisted out of her hold. Its shape was that of a gravid goldfish, with a smaller sphere hanging beneath it. It went overside, slowly, and there it floated, rolling wildly on the waves. For a very long time nothing seemed to happen. Then the water-level of the float sank a little. It was being filled with gasoline, which is lighter than water and practically incompressible.

On the _Esperance_, the tow had been pulled alongside and the yacht's powerful winch hauled it upright. The yacht heeled over from the weight. The crew-cuts fastened the canvas sack in place, and Davis loaded the explosive charge into the iron tube. The crew-cuts cleared the nets. This preliminary operation seemed promising, and it was quite likely that the dredge would operate as it was designed to do.

The _Pelorus_ whistled impatiently. Nick abandoned his job and went below to the short-wave set. He returned shortly after.

"The _Pelorus_ says she'll be ready to send the bathyscaphe down for a test dive in two hours," he reported. "She says she will object if our gadget is floating free at the time, on the chance that it might interfere with the bathyscaphe. She asks if you can send our dredge down right away and get it over with."

"Tell them yes," said Davis. "In five minutes."

He compressed his lips. The _Esperance's_ device, though clumsy, was fundamentally simple. Five minutes later the top of the central spar was level with the water. "Cut away," said Davis.

Doug slashed the single rope holding the dredge. It sank immediately.

The recorder gave off the sound of waves. Occasionally, very occasionally, a chirping or a grunt could be heard. Twenty minutes. Thirty.

There was a "crump!" from the loudspeaker which reported underwater events. The sound seemed to come from very far below. Even a small amount of explosive makes a very considerable concussion when it goes off so far down, and the shock travels in all directions instead of merely upward. The recorder picked up that concussion as a deep-bass sound.

The sun shone. The wind increased. Waves marched in serried ranks from here to there.

A long, long time later the inflated canvas bag came up and was floating on top of the waves. The _Pelorus_ whistled. Nick went below. A few minutes later he came up again to report.

"The _Pelorus_ says not to cast our dredge adrift. They're sending the bathyscaphe down unmanned, to test all apparatus before a manned dive. They don't want any debris in the sea."

"Tell them we send them a kiss," snapped Davis, "and they needn't worry!"

The _Esperance_ approached the floating bag. Jug swung out on the lifting boom and hooked it. The winch hauled it out of the water. The concrete weights were gone. What the nets had captured was not pretty to see. A dead fish with foliated appendages had come up from far below, to judge by what its unpunctured swim bladder had done to it in uncontrolled expansion. Davis said curtly it was _Linophrine arborifer_, belonging two thousand fathoms below. An angry-looking creature, similarly dead, was _Opisthoproctus grimaldi_. It belonged deeper than the other. There were other specimens. A _genostoma_ of a species the books didn't picture; a _Myctophum_; and various other creatures, mostly as grotesque as their scientific names. All were abyssal fish. They had died while rising from a pressure of several tons per square inch to surface-pressure only.

"It worked," said Davis curtly. "I almost wish it hadn't. Let it down into the water again. We'll jettison it when the _Pelorus_ gives us permission."

Time passed. More time. Still more. The bathyscaphe was now in the water, practically awash. Only a small conning tower showed above the waves. Men swarmed around it.

There came a query from the _Pelorus_. The _Esperance_ gave assurance that the deep-sea dredge had returned to the surface and would be kept there.

The bathyscaphe was allowed to sink.

The recorder on the yacht began to pick up deep-toned mooing sounds from the depths.

Presently, the mooing sounds ceased.

Two hours later, waves broke over an object completely awash on the ocean. The _Pelorus_ steamed cautiously toward it. Boats went down from her sides and surrounded the float.

After a long time the _Pelorus_ got alongside and men quickly fastened the huge buoy to the ship. Then the down-wind sea changed its appearance. A reek of gasoline reached the _Esperance_.

"Something happened," said Davis dourly. "They're dumping the gasoline--not even pumping it aboard. Let's get out of the stink."

The _Esperance_ beat to windward. The _Pelorus_ began to lift something large and ungainly out of the water. The _Esperance_ went down-wind to take a look at it.

The yacht went past no more than fifty yards away, just as the bathyscaphe left the water and swung clear.

The bathyscaphe's conning-tower was gone. It had been torn away by brute force. The three-inch-thick steel globe.... Half of it was gone. The rest was crushed. The sphere, which had been designed to resist a crushing pressure of ten tons per square inch, had been ripped in half! It had been bitten through. Bitten!

There was no comment by anybody on the _Esperance_.

Half a mile from the oceanographic ship, Davis said in a peculiarly flat voice, "Cut away the dredge. We won't try to use it again."

Someone slashed the inflated canvas bag. It collapsed. Somebody cut away a rope. The free dredge sank, slowly. It would never come up again.

The _Esperance_ changed course. She headed north by west. There was still no conversation at all. The yacht seemed to tiptoe away from the scene of the bathyscaphe's destruction.

A long time later, Deirdre said tentatively, "Have you been making guesses, Terry?"

"Guesses, yes," he admitted.

"Such as?"

"Your father denied that the dredge was designed to stir up whatever gathered the fish together and then carried them down to the bottom of the sea. I was right there with him in the denial, but that's what we intended, just the same. We said we didn't believe there was anything there, so it couldn't do any harm to poke it. We poked, all right! Our dredge, and then the bathyscaphe...."

"But what ..."

"And a bolide fell right there a couple of nights ago," said Terry irrelevantly. "I wonder what the entity on the ocean-bottom thought of the bolide. Hm." He paused. "I wonder, too, what the bolide thought of what it found down there. Is that too crazy for a sane man to think, Deirdre?"

She shook her head.

"Why is my father working on this business?" she asked. "And why are the boys helping, and why do radar stations tell us what they find out, and why did the Philippine Government ask the _Pelorus_ to make a bathyscaphe dive at just that spot?"

Terry blinked at her.

"Too crazy for official notice, eh?" he said, "but too dangerous not to check up on! Is it absolutely certain that the bolides are bolides?"

"No."

"Thanks," said Terry. He pursed his lips as if to whistle. "I've been thinking of this thing as a puzzle. But it isn't. I'm very much afraid it's a threat!" He paused. "Y-y-es. I've just made a new guess. It adds everything together. I do hope it's wrong, Deirdre! I've got cold chills running up and down my spine!"

_Seven_

As the _Esperance_ sailed northward, she looked almost unreal. From a distance she might have been an artist's picture of an imaginary yacht heeled over in the wind, sailing splendidly over a non-existent ocean. The sky was a speckless blue, the sun was high.

But she was real enough, and the China Sea around her was genuine, and what had taken place where the _Pelorus_ lay now hull-down, stowing a ruined bathyscaphe in her hold, had unquestionably taken place.

Something monstrous and terrible was hidden in the dark abyss below the yacht. The ferocity of its attack on the bathyscaphe was daunting. And ferocity has always, somehow, a suggestion of madness about it. But the humming sound in the sea was not the product of madness. It was a technical achievement. And plastic objects with metal inclusions....

Davis joined Deirdre and Terry. Before Davis could speak she said, "I can't imagine any guess that will add everything together, Terry."

Davis made a jerky gesture.

"Today's business is beyond all reason," he said unhappily, "and if there ever was an understatement, that's it! If there can be any conceivable motive for the plastic objects, which the _Pelorus dismisses as hoaxes, the motive is to use them to find out_ something about surface conditions; that is, for surface conditions to be reported back. And that's not easy to imagine. But try to think of something easier! And yet, such mindless ferocity as attacked the bathyscaphe ... that wouldn't be curious about the surface!"

"No-o-o-o," agreed Terry. "It wouldn't. But we'd set off a bomb down below to stir things up. A couple of hours later the bathyscaphe went down. A stupid and merely ferocious thing of the depths wouldn't associate a bomb that exploded with a bathyscaphe that came down two hours later. It took intelligence to make the association of two falling objects with danger."

Deirdre beamed suddenly.

"Of course! That's it! Go on!"

"Curiosity implies intelligence," said Terry carefully, "and intelligence is a substitute for teeth or claws. We don't assume that the fish that carry the plastic gadgets made them. Why assume that whatever attacked the bathyscaphe did it of its own accord? We believe that something else makes the deep-sea fish come up into the Thrawn Island lagoon, don't we? Or do we?"

"We pretend we don't," said Deirdre.

Davis nodded reluctantly.

"Yes, we pretend we don't," he agreed. "But if intelligence is involved, I find myself getting frightened! We humans are always terrified of strange types of intelligence, anyhow. If it's intelligence that isn't human ..."

Nick came up from below.

"Thrawn Island calling," he reported. "They say the hum at the lagoon opening stopped for some forty-odd hours and then started again. They ask if we're coming. I said we were on the way. They're standing by. Anything we should tell them?"

"We'll get there some time after sunset," said Davis. "And maybe you should tell them about the _Pelorus_ and the bathyscaphe."

Nick grinned briefly. "I did. And the guy on Thrawn Island said 'Hooray' and then explained that he said that because he couldn't think of anything that fitted the idea of something biting holes in three-inch steel." He added, "I can't think of a proper comment, either."

"We'll get to Thrawn Island after sunset," repeated Davis. "Then we'll see what we find in the lagoon--if anything."

Nick started back toward the bow. He stopped.

"Oh, yes! It wasn't a scientific guy talking, just the short-wave operator. The science staff is all busy. He said they heard an hour ago that another possible bolide's been spotted by a space-radar back in the US. It was picked up farther out than one's ever been spotted before. Five thousand miles high."

Davis nodded without comment. Nick went forward and disappeared below.

A school of porpoises appeared astern. They caught up with the _Esperance_. They went rocketing past, leaping exuberantly for no reason whatever. They cut across the yacht's bow and zestfully played around her two or three times, then went on, toward a faraway horizon. They managed somehow to give the impression of creatures who have done something they consider important.

"It's said," said Terry, "that porpoises have brains as good as men's. I wish I could get one or two to talk! They might answer everything! I'm getting obsessed by this infernal business!"

"I've been at it for months," said Davis. "In the past week, though, with you on board, I have found out more things I don't understand than I believed existed!"

He walked away. Deirdre smiled at Terry.

"My father paid you a tribute," she said. "I think we've been wasting time, you and I. We do a lot of talking to each other, but we haven't been applying our massive brains to matters of real importance."

"Such as what?" asked Terry dourly.

"Foam," said Deirdre. "Big masses of foam seen to be floating on the sea. Always over the Luzon Deep. Photographed by a plane less than a month ago. Reported by fishermen much more often than you'd suspect. At least once a ship sailed into a foam-patch and dropped out of sight, exactly as if there were a hole in the sea there. Let's talk about that."

They settled down on the after-cabin roof and began a discussion on the foam-patches, for which there was no hint of an explanation. Then Deirdre mentioned that when she was a little girl she'd always been fascinated by the sight of her father shaving. The foam--the lather--entranced her. And somehow that led to something else, and that to something else still. A full hour later they were talking enjoyably about matters of no conceivable relationship to large patches of foam seen floating on the ocean's surface where the water was forty-five hundred fathoms deep.

Davis came to a halt beside them.

"Morton's just been talking to me from Thrawn Island," he said abruptly. "He's very much upset. It's about that prospective bolide that was spotted from Palomar. It's been right there for two hours."

Terry waited.

"Morton," said Davis, "would like us to try to photograph it when it comes in, back where the _Pelorus_ was this morning."

Terry stared. Shooting stars are not rare. On an average summer night anybody can see at least three in an hour's watch of any one quarter of the sky. Bolides are a rare kind of shooting star. Still, many people have seen one or two in their lifetime. But nobody plans ahead of time to observe a bolide, and still less does anybody ever plan in advance to watch a meteorite arrive on the earth's surface, whether on land or sea. It is simply not thinkable.

"We'll go back and try," said Davis. He seemed embarrassed. "Morton says there's no sense to it at all, and that if we do get photographs they'll be considered fakes. He's really wrought up. But he asked if I thought I could get a plane out from Manila to watch it fall--if it comes. I'm going to try that too." He added, more embarrassed still, "Of course nobody'd pay attention if I explained why the plane should go there. I'll have to say that I'm just looking for something else peculiar to happen at that spot. The _Pelorus_ must have already reported that one peculiar thing has happened."

Terry opened his mouth, and closed it again. Davis went away.

"You had an idea," said Deirdre accusingly. "What?"

"I was thinking of Horta," said Terry. "Police Captain Horta. A very honest man with no scientific knowledge at all. Nobody with a scientific education would pay any attention, but I could get him to tell a few others who know as little as he does, and if the damned thing does turn up, there'll be proof it was foretold. If it doesn't arrive--" Terry shrugged, "I've no scientific reputation to lose."

"Wonderful!" said Deirdre warmly. "But you wouldn't have proposed it but for me! I'll put things in motion!"

She vanished. Within minutes the _Esperance_ came about in a wide semicircle and headed in the direction from which she had just come. Deirdre stayed out of sight for a long while. When she came up it was to tell Terry that Nick was calling on the short-wave set. He'd raised the flattop in Manila Bay. The flattop had raised the shore. Telephone calls were being made to here and there and everywhere to get Horta to a short-wave station to take a call from Terry.

It was near sunset when the complicated call was ready and Horta's voice came into a pair of headphones Terry was wearing in the _Esperance's_ radio room.

"I need," said Terry slowly, "to have a number of people in Manila know now of something that's going to happen out at sea tonight. They'll be needed to testify that they knew of the prediction before the event. Can you arrange it?"

"_Por supuesto_," said Horta's voice cheerfully. "Are we not _amigos_? What is the prediction and who should know?"

"The prediction," said Terry doggedly, anticipating disbelief and protest, "is that at twelve minutes after nine o'clock tonight a large meteorite will fall into the sea where--hmm--where _La Rubia_ catches her fish. No, you'd better not locate it that way. I'll give you the position."

Davis, standing by, wrote the position in latitude and longitude and handed it to him. He read it into the transmitter.

"Have you got it?" he demanded. "Is it written down?"

"Ah, yes," said Horta tranquilly. "I will see that they make a memorandum of the matter. Shall I tell three or four persons, or more? I have news for you also. Jimenez...."

"Look here!" said Terry sharply. "I want this thing to be past all doubt! Everybody who's ever been worried about _La Rubia_ should know about this! There should be no possible doubt about it! But there should be disbelief, so people who don't believe will try to verify that it didn't happen, so they can crow over the people who thought it would, or might."

"Ah!" said Horta. "You wish you stick out the neck! It is serious! Now tell me again!"

"At twelve minutes after nine tonight," said Terry doggedly, "A shooting star will fall into the sea at...." He named the latitude and longitude Davis had given him. "That is where _La Rubia_ catches her fish."

"A shooting star will fall there?" protested Horta. "But who knows where they fall?"

"You do," said Terry. "This one, anyhow. Now, will you see that a number of people know about it?"

"It is cr-azy!" objected Horta. Then he said, "I will do it."

The short-wave call ended, with Horta too much disturbed to refer again to Jimenez.

By sunset Doug had gotten out the gun-cameras. Doug held an impromptu class on deck, showing the other crew-cuts exactly how to aim the cameras and expose the films, and what button to press to change film automatically between shots. He was unhappy because he did not know how bright the object to be photographed would be, for his lens-settings. He was even more unhappy because the bolide might travel at practically any angular velocity, so he didn't know how to set the shutters. But the focus would be infinity, and if he used the fastest possible film, he could stop most motion with a hundredth second exposure.

Instead of reaching Thrawn Island shortly after sunset, then, the _Esperance_ was back above the place where the dredge had been dropped and the bathyscaphe wrecked. The _Pelorus_ was gone. The people on board that ship must have been very upset. The bathyscaphe had cost more money than is usually allotted to most scientific researchers, and now it was smashed. How would they justify themselves? They could hardly blame the _Esperance_.

The yacht sailed in a closed pattern over this area of the Luzon Deep. Deirdre served dinner on deck. Stars shone down almost instantly after a sunset of unusual magnificence, even for the China Sea. Tony brought his guitar aft, and a contagious feeling of exhilaration spread about the _Esperance_ and an improvised party took place on deck. Maybe the mood for festivity arose from the realization that at least nine-tenths of the world's population would have graded them as lunatics, had it known their project for the evening.

It would have been unjust, of course. Terry reflected that it had not been their idea to make an appointment with a shooting star. They were doing it out of some sort of professional courtesy, "from one set of crackpots to another," Terry phrased it in his own mind. It was a wild attempt to secure proof of the starkly impossible. So there was chatter, singing, and some dancing. The high spot was perhaps the time when Jug bashfully serenaded the rigging and the stars above it with howling melodies he'd learned in college.

Eventually, Nick went down to the short-wave set. Doug passed out the gun-cameras again, after checking each one. Nick popped his head out of the hatch.

"Dr. Morton's been calling like crazy," he reported. "The bolide's made four orbital turns, coming in all the while. It ought to touch the atmosphere next time around. ETO is nine-twelve-seventeen-seconds. I told him we're all set."

His head disappeared.

"Don't forget!" Doug said anxiously. "The cameras will feel like shotguns but don't lead your target! And don't forget to press the film-changer!"

Terry lifted his gun-camera experimentally. It did feel like a shotgun. And then, suddenly, he disbelieved everything: the purpose of the _Esperance's_ original investigation; the phenomena that had been observed; the guesses that had been made. It was pure insanity! He felt a quick impatience with himself for becoming entangled in anything so ridiculous.

Deirdre leaned toward him and whispered forlornly, "Terry! It's dreadful! I've just had an attack of common sense! What are we doing here? We're crazy!"

He put his hand consolingly over hers. The act was unpremeditated and the sensation was startling. He found that they were staring at each other intently in the starlight.

"I think ..." said Terry, unsteadily, "that it's very sensible to be crazy. We've got to ... talk this over."

Deirdre smiled at him shakily.

"Y-yes, we will."

Then Davis pointed out positions for the camera operators. The bolide's course should be three hundred fifty degrees, not quite on a north-south line. It might land short of, or beyond, the _Esperance_. Or it might pass many miles to the east or west. Dr. Morton needed as many pictures of it against recognizable stars as could possibly be secured.

Suddenly, there was a faint, dull rumbling in the heavens. It grew louder. Presently, cruising lights appeared in the sky. They maintained a fixed relationship to each other. They looked like moving stars, flying in formation from star-cluster to star-cluster.

Nick popped abovedecks again.

"The planes just called us," he reported. "They've just had a Loran position-check and they're on the mark. They've got orders to observe any unusual phenomena occurring around nine-twelve P.M., Manila time. Using civilian terminology, it sounds like they're saying the Philippine Government asked them to come out and take a look."

"It's five after nine now," said Davis.

The _Esperance_ headed into the wind. Her bow rose and fell. Waves washed past, and roarings trundled about under the stars overhead, and very tiny lights moved in a compact group across the firmament.

Time passed.

At twenty-two seconds after nine-twelve--which is to say at twenty-one hours, twelve minutes, twenty-two seconds--a light appeared in the sky from the north. It grew steadily brighter. It suddenly flared very brightly indeed, then dimmed, and continued to rise above the horizon. Seconds later it flared again, very briefly.

Terry found himself aiming the gun-camera. He pulled trigger and changed film and pulled trigger and changed film.

The bright light ceased to climb. It grew steadily brighter and brighter, and then it flared for the third time--Terry's mind asked skeptically, 'Braking rockets?'--and the light was so intense that the cracks in the yacht's deck-planking could be seen. Then the extra brilliance vanished, and suddenly the moving light was no longer white, but reddish.

Terry aimed again and fired the gun-camera.

The light passed almost directly overhead. Terry had the impression that he felt its heat upon his skin.

It plunged into the sea two miles beyond the _Esperance_. The shock-wave caused by the impact tapped on the yacht's side-planking a few seconds later. Starlight shone upon a plume of steam.

Then there was nothing but the noise of the circling planes above. Then a sound, as of thunder. It disappeared northward. It was the sound of the bolide's passage, arriving after the object itself had dived into the sea.

The people on the _Esperance_ were dumfounded. Nick went below and came up again a few minutes latter.

"The planes were calling," he reported. "They say they noted the unusual phenomenon. They ask if they should stay around for something else."

"I think," said Davis caustically, "that that's all that's scheduled just now. Tell them so."

The _Esperance_ went on steadily again, a trifle west of north. Davis was below, talking via radio to Dr. Morton at the satellite tracking base.

Terry and Deirdre went to look for a place where they could talk over something privately. It was of enormous importance to them, but it was not connected with fish or meteorites or plastic objects or anything at all but the two of them. And to them the yacht seemed crowded with people, even though there was nobody else abovedecks but one of the crew-cuts at the wheel.

When the _Esperance_ entered the lagoon the next morning, though, their private talk had evidently come to a satisfactory conclusion. Deirdre smiled at Terry without any reason whatever, and he looked at once smug and embarrassed and uneasy, as if he possessed a new status to which he was still unaccustomed.

The recorder, trailing a submarine ear overboard, had duly reported the presence of the hum in the water, just outside the lagoon. It had not been operating for forty hours or thereabouts. During that time the fish inside could go out of the lagoon, if they chose. And other fish could come in. Terry said suddenly, as the yacht went under power toward the tracking station wharf, "Suppose there was a cone of noise just outside the lagoon, and the flanks of the submarine mountain under us were included in the cone? And suppose the cone grew smaller, like the other one. What would happen?"

Deirdre shook her head, smiling at him.

"The fish," said Terry, "could escape into the lagoon."

"Probably," agreed Deirdre.

"And if fish could be driven downward along a certain path," said Terry, "the way we saw it happen, why, fish could be driven up in a certain path, too."

"Obviously," said Deirdre.

"So if something wanted to replace the fish in the lagoon, or to add to their number, why, it would puncture their swim bladders far, far down, and then drive them up to the surface and into the lagoon, and then keep the noise going to keep them inside."

"Is this a new idea?" asked Deirdre.

"N-n-o," admitted Terry. "I've had it for some time."

"So," said Deirdre, "have I."

The _Esperance's_ engine stopped, and she floated to gentle contact with the wharf. Members of the tracking station staff made the yacht fast. With others, Dr. Morton came on board. His expression was the picture of unrelieved gloom.

"I'm in a nice spot!" he told Davis. "I predicted a second bolide correctly! I had to use a different retardation factor to make the math come out right. Now I'm asked to explain that! How can I tell them I knew where it would fall, and only had to compute when?"

"Come below and look at the pictures we got," said Davis.

They disappeared down the after-cabin hatch. Terry knew about the pictures. Doug had developed them with sweating care, developing each negative separately and adjusting the development-time to the varying exposures of the bright object.

There was a total of twenty reasonably good pictures of the bolide, from its first appearance to its plunge into the ocean, two miles from the _Esperance_. Doug had enlarged some of them. There were distinct star-patterns in most. In nearly all, though, the object was more or less blurred by its own motion. In those taken when it flared most brightly, the blurriness was especially marked. There was only one picture of professional, if accidental, quality, and it was the least convincing of all. It showed the fore-part of a conical shape traveling point-first. Nobody would conceivably believe that it was a meteorite. It looked artificial.

Terry and Deirdre, as it happened, stayed on deck. The people of the tracking station made a babbling uproar. It appeared that the most important event in history, as history was viewed on Thrawn Island, had taken place the night before. It was revealed--Terry had not suspected his own success--that in asking Horta to see that there was foreknowledge of a meteoric fall, Terry had arranged for the matter to be taken immediately to high Philippine Government officials. The American flattop, at their request, had sent planes to the place of the fall, with orders which were enigmatic only until the descending object appeared. Then every man in every plane knew that he'd been sent there to see it.

So there could be no question but that Dr. Morton had predicted it. That meant that he knew more about meteoric objects than anybody else in the world. What he had to say was of vast importance, and Thrawn Island shared in his achievement. But it was a strictly professional triumph. The news would not break in the newspapers. No ordinary reader would believe in it. And nobody anywhere would believe in Morton's knowledge of the place of the fall before he began to calculate.

Terry observed that the people of Thrawn Island were definitely no longer interested in fish. They'd kept their eyes open for oddities because a deep-sea fish with a plastic object attached had been caught in the lagoon a long while before. They'd been intensely interested when Terry herded all the lagoon fish into one small inner bay, and they speared sixty fish that had no business being at the surface. They'd found eight more plastic objects. Such things had been interesting, if not important. But now the head of the Thrawn Island staff had computed the place and time of arrival of a meteoric mass from space! And he did it when that mass was five thousand miles out! From a professional standpoint, this was stupendous! They tried to make Terry see how important it was.

Davis and Morton came up from below. They headed for the shore. The crew-cuts trailed off to the land with most of the visitors. Only Deirdre and Terry remained on the yacht, with a mere short-wave operator from the island.

"We're going to have a fancy lunch, with champagne and speeches," the operator said hopefully. "You'll come?"

"Naturally!" said Terry. "But first we're going swimming. We haven't had a chance to be overboard since the last time we were here."

"We'll be back in time for lunch," Deirdre assured the operator, "but swimming here is so wonderful! We've been talking about it for days!"

She went below to change. The operator shrugged. After a further attempt to interest Terry in the celebration of an astronomical first, he went ashore. Terry went with him to get the outboard motorboat he and Deirdre had used before. He was already wearing swimming trunks.

A little later the small boat putt-putted away from the _Esperance_ upon the glassy-rippled waters of the lagoon.

There was a very great tranquillity everywhere. The booming roar of the surf came from unseen rollers on the reef outside. Seabirds squawked. Palms along the edge of the lagoon waved their fronds very, very gently.

"How far will you go before we swim?" asked Deirdre. "All the lagoon's perfect. One place is as good as another."

He cut off the motor.

"Hmmm. There's a deep place yonder," he observed. "That's where I went with the aqualung and speared the freak fish. Stay away from it."

She jumped over in a clean dive. He joined her in the water. She came up, blowing bubbles.

"All right, Terry. What are your troubles?"

"That bolide bothers me," he told her. "It had a specific destination! It was meant to hit the water over the Luzon Deep!"

She dived again. This time Terry followed her. The underwater world was beautifully bright, with ripplings making everything seem to shimmer because of the changing light. When they came up again Deirdre said, "Funny!"

"It had a purpose!" insisted Terry. "There were others before it, and they had a purpose too! That's not funny!"

"I didn't mean that," said Deirdre. "I meant ... just now, under the water.... What's that?"

There was a swirling at the surface, some tens of yards away. It was not the curling eddy made by a fish about to break surface. It was too big a disturbance for that. It looked as if something stirred, barely submerged, but something very large. Terry, staring, thought of a porpoise cavorting just below the ripples. Or perhaps a shark. But sharks and porpoises are too small to have made this eddying. It reappeared.

"Get in the boat!" snapped Terry. "Quick!"

While she climbed in he let himself sink, his eyes open. There was a clouding of the water underneath, where the surface-disturbance had been. It was mud from the bottom which had been stirred up. He could see nothing clearly through it, though nearby and around him he could easily see the colorings of coral and fan sponges, and he could see small fish darting here and there.

He broke surface. Deirdre bent anxiously over the gunwale.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," he said curtly. "But give me a fish spear."

"You won't...."

"I just want to have something in my hand," he told her impatiently, "while I look."

He took the spear she handed him, and sank once more. Again something moved in the deeper part of the lagoon. It was a fretful motion, as if a creature or creatures tried to burrow away from the light shining through the water. Whatever moved, a thick cloud of debris from the bottom floated all the way up to the surface.

Terry came up for air.

"There's something queer there," he said shortly. "I don't know what."

He went under and swam cautiously nearer to the disturbance. He was within a few feet of the curling cloud of obscurity when something like a gigantic worm came out of it. Or maybe it was like an elephant's trunk, only no elephant ever had a trunk so huge. It was a dull and glistening writhing object. Its end was rounded. The tip of the worm-like thing must have been a foot in diameter, and it came out of the mud cloud for four feet, then six, then, fifteen feet. It thickened only slightly in that length. It groped blindly in the brightness.

Terry swam back quickly, and the object reared up and made a groping sweep through the clear water. Some peculiar white disks suddenly appeared on the underside of the long tentacle. They looked like sucker-disks, able to grip anything at all. The monstrous tentacle fumbled for Terry, as if guided by the pressure-waves his movements generated.

Terry froze. Deirdre moved in the boat almost directly overhead. Something clanked in the boat and he heard it. The boat was probably rocking, making the pressure-waves that a creature from the abyss would depend upon for guidance where eyes would not serve at all.

The thick, bulging tentacle reached toward the sound at the surface, now ignoring Terry, though he was nearer. He was still. The white sucker-disks on its under side had several rings of a horny, tooth-like substance at their rims. The smallest were about four inches wide. The fumbling object felt blindly in the water. Deirdre stirred again in the boat. The visible portion of the groping monstrosity was already longer than the boat. The whole creature would be enormous! If this groping arm rested upon the gunwale of the boat, it could easily swamp it.

It groped for the boat, coming horribly out of a cloud of mud. It reached out. In another instant it would touch....